A L Theakston
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 2522407 |
|---|---|
| NOME | A L Theakston |
| PRENOMES | A L |
| SOBRENOME | Theakston |
| ASSINATURA | THEAKSTON A L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9483-7893 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2001 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain “binding-principle” constraints on pronoun interpretation
Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. himself ) are driven by real-world likelihood. • Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. he, him ) are driven by topicality. • Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. he, him ) are driven by discourse-pragmatics. • Innate binding principles may be unnecessary to explain pronoun interpretation. How do English-speakers interpret pronouns (e.g., himself, him and he ) in sentences such as Samuel told Oliver abo…
The role of iconicity in children's production of adverbial clauses
Young children's comprehension of adverbial clauses is significantly affected by iconicity, which refers to whether the order of information in the sentence reflects the order of events in the real world. In contrast, clause order (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main) and input frequency of specific adverbial clauses do not seem to play independent roles (De Ruiter et al., 2018). The present study tests children's sentence production across fou…
Do complement clauses with first- or third-person perspective support false-belief reasoning? A training study with English-speaking 3-year-olds
To investigate whether acquisition of the perspective-marking grammar of complement-clause constructions supports progression in children's false-belief reasoning, we conducted a training study with 76 English-speaking 3-year-olds from the North-West of England (age range: 3;0-3;10 years, 50% female, 80% White). Children were randomly assigned to one of three maximally comparable training conditions, and in a 4-week eight-session program, all chi…
The acquisition of English modal constructions
The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense mother-child corpora at age 3 and 4. We examined the influence on acquisition of input features including form…
The influence of pragmatic function on children's comprehension of complex because- and if-sentences
Introduction In complex adverbial sentences, the connectives because and if can perform different pragmatic functions (e.g. Content, Speech-Act), although this is often overlooked in studies investigating children's acquisition of these connectives. In this study, we investigated whether pragmatic variation is responsible for some of the difficulty young children have in understanding because - and if -sentences and tested the extent to which pat…
Does evidentiality support source monitoring and false belief understanding? A cross-linguistic study with Turkish- and English-speaking children
This study investigates the impact of evidentiality on source monitoring and the impact of source monitoring on false belief understanding (FBU), while controlling for short-term memory, age, gender, and receptive vocabulary. One hundred (50 girls) monolingual 3- and 4-year-olds from Turkey and the UK participated in the study in 2019. In Turkish, children's use of direct evidentiality predicted their source monitoring skills, which, in turn, pre…
Many ways to decline a noun
Aims This study investigated three- to five-year-olds’ ability to generalise knowledge of case inflection to novel nouns in Estonian, which has complex morphology and lacks a default declension pattern. We explored whether Estonian-speaking children use similar strategies to adults, and whether they default to a preferred pattern or use analogy to phonological neighbours. Method We taught children novel nouns in nominative or allative case and el…
Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions
We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials “after”, “before”, “because”, and “if” in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00–4;07). In comparing mothers’ and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these us…
A comparison of the pragmatic patterns in the spontaneous because- and if-sentences produced by children and their caregivers
Findings from corpus (e.g. Diessel, 2004) and comprehension (e.g. De Ruiter et al., 2018) studies show that children produce the adverbial connectives because and if long before they seem able to understand them. However, although children's comprehension is typically tested on sentences expressing the pragmatic relationship which Sweetser (1990) calls "Content", children also hear and produce sentences expressing "Speech–Act" relationships (e.g.…
Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds
To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds (23 female, Time 1 age range = 33-41 months) from middle-class families in the North-West of England…
Interactions between givenness and clause order in children’s processing of complex sentences
Understanding complex sentences that contain multiple clauses referring to events in the world and the relations between them is an important development in children's language learning. A number of theoretical positions have suggested that factors like syntactic structure (clause order), iconicity (whether the order of clauses reflects the order of events), and givenness (whether information is shared between speakers) affect ease of comprehensi…
Similarity, analogy and development in radical exemplar theory
During language acquisition children generalise at multiple layers of granularity. Ambridge argues that abstraction-based accounts suffer from lumping (over-general abstractions) or splitting (over-precise abstractions). Ambridge argues that the only way to overcome this conundrum is in a purely exemplar/analogy-based system in which generalisations are based on similarity to individual exemplars. However, to move our understanding forward, radic…
Intention or Attention Before Pointing
Gestures are the first signs of intentional communication within prelinguistic infants and can reflect various motives, including a declarative motive to share attention and interest. The ability to use gestures declaratively has been linked to later language development; therefore, it is important to understand the origins of this motive. Previous research has focused on the use of declarative pointing at around 12 months; however, other potenti…
Converging and competing cues in the acquisition of syntactic structures
In two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting conjoined agent intransitives. The same children, however, do not appear to rely exclusively on the number of…
The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses…
Authors' response
Peer-reviewed
The Relationship Between Infant Holdout and Gives, and Pointing
We provide an analysis of holdout and giving ( H o& G ) behaviours in prelinguistic infants and investigate their relationship with index finger pointing. The frequency of H o& G s at 10 and 11 months along with the length of the following social interaction correlated with index finger pointing at 12 months. We conclude that H o& G s are a precursor to index finger pointing and that this provides support for social‐pragmatic approaches to commun…
How do modelled gestures influence preschool children’s spontaneous gesture production
Around the age of nine months, children start to communicate by using first words and gestures, during interactions with caregivers. The question remains as to how older preschool children utilise the gestures they observe into their own gestural representations of previously unseen objects. Two accounts of gesture production (the ‘gesture learning’, and ‘simulated representation’ accounts) offer different predictions for how preschool children u…
Young children’s understanding of denial
Although a fair amount is known about young children's production of negation, little is known about their comprehension. Here, we focus on arguably the most complex basic form, denial, and how young children understand denial, when it is expressed in response to a question with gesture, single word, or sentence. One hundred twenty-six children in 3 age groups (Ms = 1 year 9 months, 2 years 0 months, and 2 years 4 months) witnessed an adult look …
Handling agents and patients
Gesture is an important precursor of children's early language development, for example, in the transition to multiword speech and as a predictor of later language abilities. However, it is unclear whether gestural input can influence children's comprehension of complex grammatical constructions. In Study 1, 3- (M = 3 years 5 months) and 4-year-old (M = 4 years 6 months) children witnessed 2-participant actions described using the infrequent obje…
Naturalistic Data
Data collection is an important part of language research.
The acquisition of the active transitive construction in English
In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earliest SVO utterances reflect earlier use of those same verbs, and that verbs acquired before 2;7 show an earlier move towards adult-like levels of use in the SVO construction and in object argument…
Productivity of a Polish child's inflectional noun morphology
Are infinitival to omission errors primed by prior discourse? The case of Want constructions
This paper examines the suggestion that infinitival to omission errors in English-speaking children can result from competition between two constructions (Kirjavainen et al., First Language 29: 313–339, 2009a). Kirjavainen et al. suggested that the acquisition of two (or more) constructions (e.g., WANT-X and WANT- to ) for verbs taking to -infinitival complement clauses can lead to infinitival to omissions, reflecting the relative frequencies of …
Can input explain children's me-for-I errors
English-speaking children make pronoun case errors producing utterances where accusative pronouns are used in nominative contexts ( me do it ). We investigate whether complex utterances in the input ( Let me do it ) might explain the origin of these errors. Longitudinal naturalistic data from seventeen English-speaking two- to four-year-olds was searched for 1psg accusative-for-nominative case errors and for all 1psg preverbal pronominal contexts…
The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies
A number of researchers have claimed that questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies (LDDs) are acquired relatively early, by age 4 or even earlier, in spite of their complexity. Analysis of LDD questions in the input available to children suggests that they are extremely stereotypical, raising the possibility that children learn lexically specific templates such as WH do you think S-GAP? rather than general rules of the ki…
The acquisition of auxiliary syntax
This study examined patterns of auxiliary provision and omission for the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in a longitudinal data set from 11 children between the ages of two and three years. Four possible explanations for auxiliary omission—a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations in production, the Optional Infinitive hypothesis, and patterns of auxiliary use in the input—were examined. The data suggest that although none of these accounts pr…
Young children’s understanding of denial
Although a fair amount is known about young children's production of negation, little is known about their comprehension. Here, we focus on arguably the most complex basic form, denial, and how young children understand denial, when it is expressed in response to a question with gesture, single word, or sentence. One hundred twenty-six children in 3 age groups (Ms = 1 year 9 months, 2 years 0 months, and 2 years 4 months) witnessed an adult look …
Pronoun co-referencing errors
This study tests accounts of co-reference errors whereby children allow ‘‘Mama Bear’ ’ and ‘‘her’ ’ to co-refer in sentences like ‘‘Mama Bear is washing her’ ’ (Chien and Wexler 1990). 63 children aged 4;6, 5;6 and 6;6 participated in a truth-value judgment task augmented with a sentence pro-duction component. There were three major finding: 1) contrary to predic-tions of most generativist accounts, children accepted co-reference even in cases of…
Productivity of a Polish child's inflectional noun morphology
Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds
To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds (23 female, Time 1 age range = 33-41 months) from middle-class families in the North-West of England…
Handling agents and patients
Gesture is an important precursor of children's early language development, for example, in the transition to multiword speech and as a predictor of later language abilities. However, it is unclear whether gestural input can influence children's comprehension of complex grammatical constructions. In Study 1, 3- (M = 3 years 5 months) and 4-year-old (M = 4 years 6 months) children witnessed 2-participant actions described using the infrequent obje…
How do modelled gestures influence preschool children’s spontaneous gesture production
Around the age of nine months, children start to communicate by using first words and gestures, during interactions with caregivers. The question remains as to how older preschool children utilise the gestures they observe into their own gestural representations of previously unseen objects. Two accounts of gesture production (the ‘gesture learning’, and ‘simulated representation’ accounts) offer different predictions for how preschool children u…
The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of verb-argument structure
This study investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Valian (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames because they do not require a direct object argument. Children who understand this distinction are expected to produce a lower proportion of transitive verb utterances early in development in comparison wi…
Going, going, gone
This study investigated different accounts of early argument structure acquisition and verb paradigm building through the detailed examination of the acquisition of the verb Go . Data from 11 children followed longitudinally between the ages of 2;0 and 3;0 were examined. Children's uses of the different forms of Go were compared with respect to syntactic structure and the semantics encoded. The data are compatible with the suggestion that the chi…
Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations
The current studies used a priming methodology to assess the abstractness of children's early syntactic constructions. In the main study, 3‐, 4‐ and 6‐year‐old children were asked to describe a prime picture by repeating either an active or a passive sentence, and then they were left to their own devices to describe a target picture. For half the children at each age, the prime sentences they repeated had high lexical overlap with the sentence th…
Determinants of acquisition order in wh-questions
Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguistic factors; the syntactic fu…
Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax
In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency determines the early acquisition of particular lexical items. The present study evaluates the relative i…
The Modularity Matching model
In his review of Crain & Thornton's (C&T) (1998) ‘Investigations in Universal Grammar’ (IUG), Drozd raises the question of how models of children's linguistic competence relate to their linguistic performance. He highlights the use of processing limitations (PLs) to explain children's non-adultlike performance in most models of acquisition that adopt a Universal Grammar (UG) framework. Although the Modularity Matching (MM) model claims to avoid t…
The acquisition of auxiliaries BE and Have
Auxiliary syntax is recognized to be one of the more complex aspects of language that children must acquire. However, there is much disagreement among researchers concerning children's early understanding of auxiliaries, with some researchers advocating a relatively abstract grammar as the basis for auxiliary syntax, while others view the acquisition of auxiliary syntax as the gradual accumulation of linguistic knowledge, initially tied to indivi…
Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model
One of the most influential recent accounts of pronoun case-marking errors in young children's speech is Schütze & Wexler's (1996) Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The ATOM predicts that the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects will be so low that such errors can be reasonably disregarded as noise in the data. The present study tests this prediction on data from 12 children between the ages of 1;8.22 and 3;0.10. This is done,…
The acquisition of auxiliary syntax
This study examined patterns of auxiliary provision and omission for the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in a longitudinal data set from 11 children between the ages of two and three years. Four possible explanations for auxiliary omission—a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations in production, the Optional Infinitive hypothesis, and patterns of auxiliary use in the input—were examined. The data suggest that although none of these accounts pr…
Note of clarification on the coding of light verbs in ‘Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax’ (Journal of Child Language 31, 61–99)
In our recent paper, ‘Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax’ ( Journal of Child Language 31 , 61–99), we presented data from two-year-old children to examine the question of whether the semantic generality of verbs contributed to their ease and stage of acquisition over and above the effects of their typically high frequency in the language to which children are exposed. We adopted two different categorization schemes…
Comparing different accounts of inversion errors in children's non-subject wh-questions
This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words ( what, who, how and why ), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6–4;6. Rates of non-inversion error ( Who she is hitting? ) were found not to differ by wh-word, auxiliary or number alone, but by lexical auxiliary subtype and by wh-word+lexical auxiliary combin…
What part of no do children not understand? A usage-based account of multiword negation
The study investigates the development of English multiword negation, in particular the negation of zero marked verbs (e.g. no sleep , not see , can't reach ) from a usage-based perspective. The data was taken from a dense database consisting of the speech of an English-speaking child (Brian) aged 2;3–3;4 (MLU 2·05–3·1) and his mother. The focus of the study was the emergence and usage of negators in the child's and mother's speech (e.g. no , not…
The influence of discourse context on children's provision of auxiliary BE
Children pass through a stage in development when they produce utterances that contain auxiliary BE ( he's playing ) and utterances where auxiliary BE is omitted ( he playing ). One explanation that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is the presence of questions in the input that model S-V word order (Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello, 2003). The current paper reports two studies that investigate the role of the input in children's use a…
Can input explain children's me-for-I errors
English-speaking children make pronoun case errors producing utterances where accusative pronouns are used in nominative contexts ( me do it ). We investigate whether complex utterances in the input ( Let me do it ) might explain the origin of these errors. Longitudinal naturalistic data from seventeen English-speaking two- to four-year-olds was searched for 1psg accusative-for-nominative case errors and for all 1psg preverbal pronominal contexts…
I want hold Postman Pat
Infinitival-to omission errors (e.g., * I want hold Postman Pat) are produced by many English-speaking children early in development. This article aims to explain these omissions by investigating the emergence of infinitival-to, and its production/omission in obligatory contexts. A series of corpus analyses were conducted on the naturalistic data from one to 13 children between the ages of approximately 2;0 and 3;1 testing three hypotheses from t…
Pronoun co-referencing errors
This study tests accounts of co-reference errors whereby children allow ‘‘Mama Bear’ ’ and ‘‘her’ ’ to co-refer in sentences like ‘‘Mama Bear is washing her’ ’ (Chien and Wexler 1990). 63 children aged 4;6, 5;6 and 6;6 participated in a truth-value judgment task augmented with a sentence pro-duction component. There were three major finding: 1) contrary to predic-tions of most generativist accounts, children accepted co-reference even in cases of…
The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies
A number of researchers have claimed that questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies (LDDs) are acquired relatively early, by age 4 or even earlier, in spite of their complexity. Analysis of LDD questions in the input available to children suggests that they are extremely stereotypical, raising the possibility that children learn lexically specific templates such as WH do you think S-GAP? rather than general rules of the ki…
Are infinitival to omission errors primed by prior discourse? The case of Want constructions
This paper examines the suggestion that infinitival to omission errors in English-speaking children can result from competition between two constructions (Kirjavainen et al., First Language 29: 313–339, 2009a). Kirjavainen et al. suggested that the acquisition of two (or more) constructions (e.g., WANT-X and WANT- to ) for verbs taking to -infinitival complement clauses can lead to infinitival to omissions, reflecting the relative frequencies of …
Naturalistic Data
Data collection is an important part of language research.
The acquisition of the active transitive construction in English
In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earliest SVO utterances reflect earlier use of those same verbs, and that verbs acquired before 2;7 show an earlier move towards adult-like levels of use in the SVO construction and in object argument…
Productivity of a Polish child's inflectional noun morphology
How do modelled gestures influence preschool children’s spontaneous gesture production
Around the age of nine months, children start to communicate by using first words and gestures, during interactions with caregivers. The question remains as to how older preschool children utilise the gestures they observe into their own gestural representations of previously unseen objects. Two accounts of gesture production (the ‘gesture learning’, and ‘simulated representation’ accounts) offer different predictions for how preschool children u…
Young children’s understanding of denial
Although a fair amount is known about young children's production of negation, little is known about their comprehension. Here, we focus on arguably the most complex basic form, denial, and how young children understand denial, when it is expressed in response to a question with gesture, single word, or sentence. One hundred twenty-six children in 3 age groups (Ms = 1 year 9 months, 2 years 0 months, and 2 years 4 months) witnessed an adult look …
Handling agents and patients
Gesture is an important precursor of children's early language development, for example, in the transition to multiword speech and as a predictor of later language abilities. However, it is unclear whether gestural input can influence children's comprehension of complex grammatical constructions. In Study 1, 3- (M = 3 years 5 months) and 4-year-old (M = 4 years 6 months) children witnessed 2-participant actions described using the infrequent obje…
The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses…
Psychology (40 obras) · Linguistics (38 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (28 obras) · Reading and Literacy Development (20 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Cognitive psychology (14 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (13 obras) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (13 obras) · Language acquisition (12 obras)